Marco Rubio: The greatest terror threat facing the world now comes from the far left

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during an event titled "Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism" at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Article content

The following remarks were given by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in front of leaders from 60 countries, during the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism hosted at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on July 16. 

Article content

The most essential duty of the state, the first responsibility, frankly, of any government of any kind, is the protection of its people. It’s the protection of its country. This is a sacred obligation that should transcend all political and all ideological divisions. It is why, for example, we have militaries. It’s why we have intelligence agencies. It’s why counter-terrorism bureaus exist, why police forces exist. Keeping our people safe is the reason why every country represented here has all of these things.

Article content

Article content

Article content

We are all very well acquainted … with what has been described as “traditional terrorist threats.” For 25 years, the term “counter-terrorism,” at least in the West, has meant first and foremost the fight against radical Islamist extremism. And there’s a very poignant reason for that: on the 11th of September, in the year of 2001, 19 men murdered 3,000 people here in my country. Then that same enemy struck Europe, murdering nearly 200 commuters aboard trains in Madrid in 2004 and 52 more aboard London buses and the underground in the following year. The entire architecture of western counter-terrorism was rebuilt from the studs around the singular, traumatic event. That made sense at the time. Our job was to keep our people safe, and the realm of terrorism, the spectre of global jihad, was the premier threat to their safety.

Article content

Article content

And so we went to work. And we assembled a global coalition, working with many of the friends that are represented here in this room today. And we destroyed the ISIS caliphate. We killed al-Baghdadi and al-Zawahiri and bin Laden. And we built intelligence and law enforcement systems capable of anticipating and stopping attacks before the public even hears about them. Every country represented here today has disrupted
a terrorist threat at some point emanating from this source. Jihadist attacks and plots in the United States are down by two-thirds since ISIS’s peak. The number of people killed by jihadist terrorism in Europe dropped by roughly 97 per cent from the year 2015 to the year 2024. In other words, to a very great extent, our counter-terrorism strategy has worked. The threat has not disappeared, of course. It will continue to exist, particularly so long as we tolerate immigration systems that import these threats directly into our respective homelands. But this threat has been severely diminished. The world looks very different today because of it.

Article content

Article content

For far too long, however, our counter-terrorism doctrine has had a blind spot. A blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream. Or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It’s treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference. In spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.

Article content

Article content

A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think-tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that … only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system. A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary, well that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just. That’s the implication of how they treat it. For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism. It was repeated again and again, until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline, so entrenched, so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact.